by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Let us explore this bizarro fact of political life in these United States.
What's really ass-backwards odd about our establishment punditry, is that they've finally started accepting the fact that Donald Trump is leading the GOP presidential field (took them a while).
But when it comes to Bernie Sanders beating Hillary in recent polls in important states, and in the debate last week, not so much.
Just look at the pundit response to the debate. To a man and a woman, they think Hillary won. Every columnist in every major newspaper wrote that Hillary won. I couldn't believe it when I read them the next day. Were they watching the debate through their eyes or their butts?
Because everybody else thought Bernie won. Overwhelmingly. Check the chart for the numbers.
I watched the debate in a bar with a bunch of other folks, and it was clear to me and to them that Bernie won. He landed punch after punch, bang! bang! kerplatch! pashkaboom! and we cheered him far more than we cheered Hillary.
Bernie also got more whoops and applause from the crowd at the debate in Las Vegas. And he had the best line of the entire debate:
“Congress doesn't regulate Wall Street, Wall Street regulates Congress.”
Doesn't that just nail it better than even Rhett Butler diddle-donged Scarlett O'Hara?
And it was Bernie who brought down the house with the most quotable line of the night: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” Damn right. In our bar, everyone looked at one another with glee after yelling our heads off. Blow me with a hoovermatic, Bernie answered the Hillary email question way better than Hillary herself did. (And showed total gentlemanly grace towards his lady opponent to boot.)
So why do the pundits think Hillary won? Why can't they believe their own lying eyes?
Because, as the establishment, they are blinded by the fact that they are in the tank for Hillary as the establishment candidate. So much so, they cannot believe their own eyes when they look at the debate. Hillary is their gal; obviously she won. The pundits actually think their own eyes lied to them. They're like addled zombies mistaking yucky fecal matter for tasty brains.
And that brings us to an interesting conclusion.
We already know that we cannot trust any politician to tell us the truth. Now we know something else: we cannot trust our media to tell us the truth, either. Not even about something as obvious as who won a darn debate.
The mainstream media do not represent the opinion of the American people. Like our millionaires, and our politicians, they live in a privileged bubble — where the American people do not live. They have as much chance of popping their bubble as an ant has getting an elephant pregnant.
I think that's damn shocking. Jeez, even Charles Blow, the black op-ed guy at the NY Times, who should have appreciated how Bernie nailed the question about “Black Lives Matter,” naming Sandra Bland and all, thought that Hillary “crushed it.”
Let's face it. Politicians lie to us. Now journalists are lying to us, too. Even the NY Times is lying to us (you'd think they'd stop after helping George W lie us into war).
So why are the media uncomfortable with Bernie Sanders?
He scares them because he is not like them. He's not polished. He's not slick. He's for real. He speaks like a blue-collar guy from Brooklyn, and this is simply not copacetic to our media's snobbish ears. They prefer the poised, upscale persona of a Hillary Clinton to the unkempt, shlubbish affect of Bernie Sanders. But Bernie doesn't scare us: the guy looks and talks like us, so what is there to be afraid of? Heck, most of our grandpas are exactly like Bernie.
The Dem establishment is also scared that Bernie would lose in a general election. What they conveniently forget is that no Democrat would EVER vote for any dumbfuck Republican running for the office. And that they would come out in great numbers to prevent such a disaster from happening. George W. Bush was the last Republican president we'll ever have. Never again.
Don't worry: not only can Bernie beat Hillary, he would eat a Republican contender alive (as would Hillary). Jeb Bush? Marco Rubio? Donald Trump? Clowns extraordinaire. Dumbfucks deluxe. Assholes absolutement. (Did you see the GOP debates, all about defunding Planned Parenthood? Talk about a war on women. And Latinos. And blacks. And the poor. Unbelievable: the Republicans hate America.)
The democratic socialist label that Bernie gives himself probably scares our political elite the most. But they have no idea how things have changed in America. The most amazing part of the debate was watching the debaters talk about capitalism in a negative way. Hillary said capitalism has to be saved from itself. Listen to this exchange between the moderator and Bernie:
COOPER: “You don't consider yourself a capitalist, though?”
SANDERS: “Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little by which Wall Street's greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don't.”
And this bit:
COOPER: “Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
SANDERS: “Well, we're going to win because first, we're going to explain what democratic socialism is. And what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent — almost — own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.”
Never in all my living days of more than half a century did I think that capitalism would ever come under attack, or that socialism would be a word worth defending, in a US political debate. But maybe it is to be expected, given that in a recent poll, our young people under thirty preferred socialism to capitalism.
What our capitalist establishment elite doesn't understand, is that there's been a fundamental change of mood in our country. A tectonic shift. It's like the moon went behind a cloud, and the werewolf changed back to a bloke. We the people don't trust our establishment anymore. We feel all our institutions have failed us regular folks. Since the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush against the will of the people, and since Congress bailed out the Wall Street fraudsters and left their victims un-bailed-out, and since Occupy Wall Street happened, which put income inequality on the national agenda with “we are the 99%” (and what with our current GOP-run Congress so glaringly dysfunctional and non-productive as to be national joke), there is a new feeling afoot in the land.
My fellow Muricans, there's fire on the left. Big-time. The days of triangulation are as over as the typewriter, the dodo, and marriage being a thing between a man and a woman only. Elizabeth Warren has power and uses it. She sliced the testicles right off big-man-on-campus Larry Summers when she stopped him from becoming Chairman of the Fed, and she got a guy fired from the Brookings Institute who wrote something against her. Wall Street hates Warren and fears her like she's a Black Death rat chewing up the tender insides of their rectums. And Hillary also knows the times they are a-changing, too. Why do you think she's all of a sudden against the Keystone pipeline and the TPP deal?
When Bernie Sanders says we risk changing from a democracy to an oligarchy, and that regular Americans are working harder for less money, and that most of the new income and wealth is going to the top 1%, he touches a deep chord, that no other politician touches. When he says more folks should be voting because we need a revolution in our country, he lights a flame in the hearts of many. (The Republicans, who fear real democracy, think fewer people should be voting. What a bunch of sore losers.)
The pundits are scared because Bernie speaks the truth. He actually stands for something. It is rather bizarre that Bernie seems to be the only candidate who passionately strands for stuff (what does Hillary passionately stand for? what does Jeb Bush passionately stand for?). Bernie doesn't bother to tell us that he grew up poor, or that he loves his wife or is proud of his kids, or any of the other crap politicians lay on us to persuade us that they're real people. He doesn't even bother to attack other politicians. He is only and all about policy, and what he stands for.
And what Bernie stands for is not some way-out far-left agenda. This stuff about Bernie being far left is the complete shit of the total bull. Bernie is absolutely in the dead center of political opinion. As dead center as the eye of the Cyclops. Majorities of all voters agree with Bernie on everything he stands for (and when not of all voters, of all Democratic voters):
1. Get big money out of politics — the majority agrees with Bernie.
2. Break up the big banks — majority agrees.
3. Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour — majority agrees.
4. Income inequality is unfair and hurts us — majority agrees.
5. The rich should pay their fair share of taxes — majority agrees.
6. Community colleges should be tuition-free — majority agrees.
7. Build up our infrastructure and create millions of jobs that way — majority agrees.
8. Government should stop working for billionaires and work for the rest of America instead — majority agrees.
9. The middle-class is being stiffed and is disappearing — majority agrees.
10. We should have paid family leave — majority agrees.
11. Expand Social Security — majority agrees.
12. Medicare for all — majority agrees.
13. Tax financial transactions on Wall Street — majority agrees.
14. Stop mass incarceration and reform our justice system, so blacks don't get shot by the cops or end up in jail, but get education and jobs instead — majority agrees.
15. Climate change is a moral issue like the Pope says and we should tax carbon — majority agrees.
Isn't that all rather sane? Quite sensible? Wouldn't that make life a whole lot better for regular American folks? Isn't that what you want from a President?
Bernie scares the establishment because he tells the truth. The other lying pols, and those liars who cover politics for us, can't handle the truth. The truth scares the establishment because they live in a world of lies.
I sincerely hope Bernie blows the establishment and their world of lies out of our lives into itsy-bitsy smithereens of pisspot flotsam, so their scattered bones can do some restorative bleaching in the sunlight of truth.
Then we might finally have an America worth living in.